Odd Lots - How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.Read more: What the American Tin Can Reveals About Trump’s Volatile Tariff PolicyOnly Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability.

Bell, connection is everything. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America, plays out in one small town. Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, as you know, although you sometimes forget. You love fish.

If there's one thing I'd know about you, Tracy, you love fish. You love seafood, right? That's where you were going, right? That's exactly it. All right, famously, some people, some long-term Odd Lots listeners will have heard this story before. But the first time Joe ever invited me over to his house, he asked if I had any dietary restrictions. And I said something like, I know, like I eat everything, but I'm not a big fish person. And then I went over to his house and was promptly served pokey bowls. Yeah, sorry about

that. It's all right. They're actually really good. And I do eat fish on occasion. I'm just not that big into it. Like I eat crab cakes, oysters. I just have to be in the right mood for fish. I get it. One thing I have never eaten, though, is sardines. Oh, yeah. I've had sardines. I like them. Yeah? I don't know if I have, like, a straw.

Do you just, like, take them out of the can and just stick them in your mouth like that? Yeah, I think I have or, like, I'll put them in, like, a salad or something like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, cheese or salad with sardines. But you know what? I'm definitely taking sardines and just, like, take one out of a can and eating it, for sure. Okay. Well, I personally don't eat fish.

That's not your thing. Don't eat a lot of fish because of the taste. but it turns out it's becoming a pretty convenient distaste to have because we are now facing a sardine shortage. When we talk about tinned fish, it intersects with a bunch of interesting things that we talk about all the time or that come up. So it's like global supply chains generally. I think, you know, I've said this a couple of times on the podcast, but one factoid that I very remember from our trip to Alaska is how much fish is caught off. the shores of Alaska. It's sold in the United States, but first it takes a detour to China for process. So even if you buy U.S. caught Alaskan salmon, the chances are it's probably been

processed through China. Yeah, I find that to be really interesting. I find the sort of marketing of fish and the sort of branding because one thing that we know about tin fish, especially over the last five years, is there's a whole like new demographic that doesn't just associate it with like the cheap sunkissed or not. Star Kiss Tuna or whatever that brand was, either the sort of low-end tuna, there's sort of emerged, this like high-end premium version of canned tuna, which I really like canned tuna that's emerged. So there are all these sort of like different market things. And then you mentioned climate and some of the questions about, you know, supply and fish stocks, et cetera. There are many different intersecting stories of the canned fish story.

Yeah. And the big news right now is that Morocco, which apparently exports something like 50% of the world. sardine supply has imposed a ban on sardine exports because of, again, citing reports, overfishing. Apparently there's not enough plankton either to feed the little sardines, which is sad because it means that penguins also don't. Penguins not in Morocco, but penguins elsewhere in the world also don't have enough to eat.

So we're going to talk about all these things. We're going to talk about what's actually going on with the world's sardine supply, where sardines come from, where fish in general comes from, how it gets. that's processed, what makes a good tinned fish versus a bad tin fish. And I'm happy to say, we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Becca Milstein. She is the founder and CEO of Fishwife, which of course specializes in exactly that tin fish. And Becca, thank you so much for coming on odd thoughts. I have to say, when I finally eat my first sardine, I think it will be a fishwife sardine. I can't wait for that day, Tracy. I truly can't.

Thank you so much for having me. The packaging has got me. The packaging got me. It's very good branding. That was definitely a big focus. When I started working on the brand, you got to kind of do a bait and switch. There are a lot of people out there like, you're crazy. Are there going to be fish puns in this conversation?

Excellent. As many as many as you'll allow. But yeah, we had to really counterposition from what Americans associated with canfish, which, as you probably know, was, you know, white and blue super commodity non-branded can fish so obviously what the hard left all hand illustrated super beautiful branding um and we saw our illustrator you know all on staff creating new illustrations for us every single day so tell us about the origins of fishwife then you just touched on it there but the idea was to kind of make a premium tin fish product that would maybe make americans think a little

bit more like in Europe, right? In Europe, tin sardines are like a nice thing to have. I remember my mom getting very excited about them. 100%. Yeah. So I, I'm from New Hampshire originally. I studied abroad in southern Spain and college in a city called Granada. And Granada is a very interesting city in Spain. Have you been there? I have. Yeah. I've had some of the best Hymona of my life in Granada and cheese. They really know how to do it. The interesting thing about Granada is that to my knowledge, it is still the only city in Spain that serves free top us with every drink. So if you get like a little glass of beer, a little glass of wine, they will bring you out, whether it's, you know, on the very low end, potato trips on the very high end, like sardines,

olives, hamon, you're just always being fed, beautiful little bites. And I was super inspired experiencing that and just seeing how delicious these little snacks were because, you know, they're super simple, no cooking involved. but the ingredients were of such a high quality that it just tasted so. So again, no matter really what little bar I was at. So between that and seeing the way that Spaniards eat and, you know, really just treasure the high quality of their food products. And then traveling to Portugal, which is like where everyone has their conservary experience. And it's certainly where I had mine in Lisbon, you know, seeing these beautiful shops with rows and rows of gorgeous tinfish.

like it could not have been more different than my market basket in southern New Hampshire. And I, at the time, certainly, you know, at age 20, wasn't like, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, I started eating more canned fish. It's really, really good for you. It's ready to eat straight out at the tin. It's still stable. You know, when we were all trying to not go to the grocery store as much as possible. and there was sort of a light bulb moment, you know, seeing, I know you had Alison Roman on this podcast, seeing folks like Allison Roman and Anthony Bourdain and David Chang, like they had all been espousing.

How incredible, especially, you know, really high quality intro was or really high quality can tuna. It was definitely in the ether and I was starting to see in my own peer group, you know, people posting pictures of like little meals they were creating at home with tinfish, which is fascinating because I really. really feel like before COVID, that was not a habitual thing for people to do, like make a beautiful lunch and post about it on Instagram. It's so weird. And obviously now it's completely ubiquitous. So all of those factors combined, added with the bump. I think the canfish category saw like a 10% year-year increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is crazy. It has not been like that since broadly. And I was like, Americans deserve a better product and I think they'll be willing to pay for it. So that was

really the origin of the company. So there's sort of like two different strains I'm interested in this conversation. I want to make sure to touch on both. So that's sort of the brand origin. We'll talk more about brand and marketing. Now tell us like, and we'll get into it more, but

give us the basic supply chain that you have right now of, you know, the short version of like where a fish is caught and the steps it takes until I get it in my kitchen. Like give us like the overall sequence. I'll give you the most simple, straightforward version first, which is because the thing that you'll learn throughout this conversation is that every

seafood supply chain and canned seafood supply chain is completely different and very strange. So the first, I'll give an example of, is our cantabrian anchovies. So we source our anchovies from a tiny town in northern Spain called Santonia. And if you go to this town, Santonia, you will be blown away because it is, completely occupied by anchovy canneries. Like, that is the town. You walk through this tiny city, and it's like every canned anchovy brand you've ever heard of,

their logo, like plastered on a big warehouse. So in that case, the fishermen are going out like six miles from shore. They're using the percine method of fishing, which is, it basically is like a big, big, wide net. It's cast out into the top, sort of the top. of the ocean, it encircles a school of fish, and then the net is sort of pulled together, and the fish were brought out of the water, and then immediately put on ice. And then they're brought, you know, six miles into shore, and they're taken to the anchovy auction, and they're

marked with a number that indicates the quality of the anchovy. So that's like the size of the anchovy has been damaged, the fatteness of the anchovy. It's marked with that quality signifier, and then the bids begin. In this case, there's usually one or two folks from each cannery. And keep in mind, these canaries are, by and large, maybe all multi-generational family owned. So the canary that we work with was started in the 1940s by a man, who now has had three generations of offspring that have taken over his business

and have grown and expanded his business. So anyway, today, the grandson of this man goes to the anchovy auction, and you will have a price in mind to bid on these anchovies, and he'll go buy a bunch of anchovies. And those anchovies will be taken near three blocks away from where that auction is happening, and they'll be immediately processed,

which in this case means, I mean, I'm going deep in the processing. That's great. Yeah, that's great. So that means that the anchovies will be basically headed and tailed. So their heads will be clipped. Their tails will be clipped. And then they will be put into a barrel of rock salt in layers. And they'll be left there for anywhere between 12 to 36 months.

And actually, the longer they're in there, the higher quality they are. That being said, three years is a very, very, very long time. So it's a really, really expensive product and a pretty limited. market. Our anchovies are on average held in there from 12 to 18 months. And during that time, you know, they're cured and they develop all that beautiful flavor that we associate with anchovies. And then I'm going to keep going at the end of that 12 to 18 month period, they're removed from that bucket of rock salt and they are, their skin is removed. And basically like the beautiful little pink anchovy that we all know and love are merged. And they're

emerges from what otherwise looks like a pretty normal little silver fish. Like honestly, when you see an anchovy for the first time, like a lot of people think they're sardines because they are these like substantial long silver fish. They're cleaned. That lovely little pink anchovy is removed and then laid one at a time in the tin that you, you know, you see when you buy a fish marine anchovy product. They're cleaned extensively. They're rinsed and washed.

And then those cancers are filled with extraditional olive oil in our case. And there's themed. And then anchovies are very unique because unlike the rest of our tinfish products, they are cured through that salt curing method. So they're not actually heat treated, which makes them a dramatically more sensitive product and a much shorter shelf life product than the rest of our tin. So the rest of our tins have an average of between a five to seven year shelf life, which I think you can imagine is like truly incredible to have as a food business owner. Like they're very, very few products with that shelf life.

Antrobies only have about a year long shelf life because of that salt carey method. And they can't be exposed to heat because they'll disintegrate. So that's like the simplest supply chain and how concentrated it is. That being said, Antrobies as an actual product are by far and aware most complex to, you know, store and manage and ship. So you didn't have any prior fish experience before you started this company, right? I did not. No, I had been in the working world for about four years in the entertainment industry before starting the business. So listening to describe the fish supply chain in a place like Spain, it sounds very familial and sort of close-knit and, And probably hard to break into.

Like, I imagine you can't just go and find a fisherman and be like, hey, you want to be our supplier? How did you actually manage to source these particular people and start building up those relationships? That's sort of the interesting crux of this story is in CPG and, you know, in emerging brand CPG, it's very well known that, quote unquote, getting line time or getting a co-man co-man manufacturer to work with you is very challenging. because, you know, who knows if you're going to be around in a couple of years,

your product probably has a bunch of weird, like, better-free ingredients that the co-mands don't want to deal with. They would much rather work with much, much bigger companies that they can rely on to produce massive batches of whatever product you're working on. This case is a bit interesting because when I started the business, I was reaching out to, you know, mostly co-manufacturer, suppliers, et cetera, in America. And first and foremost, everyone was like, why are you trying to start a can fish business? Like the can fish industry is declining.

Why don't you do pouches? The pouch industry is booming. And I was like, that's really not the vibe I'm going for guys. Honestly, it doesn't really capture the European romantic aesthetic. So that was definitely at play. It wasn't like trying to think of another industry. I don't know, beverage. Beverage is always, you know, kind of going up into the right.

It wasn't like I had a bunch of other young entrepreneurs that I was competing with for this line time. And it wasn't like the category was, yeah, off like a shot. It was flat or in decline. So I think when we reached out to these European canneries, which I started doing, you know, started with the American manufacturers I could get in touch with and then very quickly start reaching out to manufacturers in Spain, Portugal. there is this, you know, America is the biggest market in the world. Establishing a market in a foreign country is, you know, near to impossible because of all of the marketing and brand building work you have to do. That being said, it's this incredibly attractive market.

There's, you know, very, very affluent, really high-paying customers. So I think when we reached out to these canneries, they must have seen that. they must have seen, okay, here is, you know, someone who's going to work really hard to try to build a market for this really premium product in America. And we don't then have to go do that work because, again, nearly impossible to accomplish. And we have a capacity. Like these canneries, they are mostly not operating at, you know, three shifts a day, seven days a week. Maybe they're operating at, you know, one or two shifts a day for five days a week. So there was some capacity at all of these canaries that we reached out to.

I think the crazy part for them is seeing how quickly an American business can grow. Because, you know, as mentioned, these businesses have been around for generations. They're family owned. They're not venture-backed. They are not looking to, you know, scale in a few years and exit. Like the way that we think about business in the U.S. This is just so different from how these businesses are, you know, conceiving of their own. Like if they have 5% year-over-year growth, that's amazing, flat, it's fine.

In some cases, I don't want to generalize, but, like, they are certainly not trying to grow up too much or 50% year-over-year. So I think, you know, Fishwife has been around for five and a half years now. The demand has been revealed for these products. And I think watching these partners, they maybe have been fine with 5% year-over-year growth and see Fishwife's volume requests triple, quadruple year-over-year. It's like hard for them to wrap their heads around. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, clean up, and half your Sunday gone.

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Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville,

a battle for the future of America, plays out in one small town. Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site

of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I take it you had a few different structural opportunities because, okay, at that point, the sort of like premium cans were not really a category yet. The existing canneries actually did have some slack

so there wasn't an intense competition to get in there. But just sort of like basically, how did you, just from a business-wise perspective, solve that you still have a cold start problem you have like no customers on day one etc you have to like get some capacity you don't really know what end demand is going to look like i guess you as they say in the startup world like the zero to one question even if it was a little easier than maybe other dTC categories what was the actual process of going to like i've got to place an order and sell it and like the commitments that you had to make to place that order yeah it's a great question so our zero to one

was 2021 and it had a distinct supply chain from the one that we have today for the most part. So as I mentioned, when I started working on the business, I was looking and open to build a supply chain both in North America and in Europe. So in the first year of the business, I started working with. The first cannery we ever worked with was a tiny microcanary in Oregon on the coast of Oregon. This is mostly servicing sports fishermen from, you know, the West coast, whether in California up to Washington. So, like, we're not talking MOQs here. This is people coming in, bringing their catch and saying, hey, make me, you know,

500 cans of tuna. So that was the first canary. Then we started working with one in Washington State, which was very similar profile, microcannery, super hands-on, no MOQ. And to be honest, what's MOQ stand for? Minimum order quantity. Oh, great. Thank you.

So, so, yeah, speaking to the issues I mentioned earlier, A huge issue that startup space is, you know, I want to start a beverage company. You need to make 50,000 units of your sparkling water grant, you know, on your first run before you have any demand before anyone knows who the heck you are. So all in all, we didn't have an MOQ issue. We certainly didn't have it in the domestic canneries because they are so, so small. And then when we started working with our first cannery in Spain, which we still work with today, we still work with the canary in Washington State, that MOQ is still on this. smaller side. I think it was maybe 20,000 units, I think. So I think I ordered 20,000 units of our sardines with preserve leaven and it lasted us maybe the entire year. But it was super messy.

Like I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, demand planning. It was probably the worst thing I am at in the entire company. So we like in the Oregon cannery, we went out of stock unexpectedly, we were out of stock of two products for three months. Like, that is what the zero to one year looked like. It was stop, stop starts, et cetera. But all the while, even with those stops and starts and even with that very small amount of inventory, I was really able to build the brand that year. Like, we still got a lot of press coverage.

We still got a lot of influencer coverage and, you know, was able to build the bread, even though the supply chain has since transformed significantly. Well, that was going to be my next question. So as your business has scaled up and, you know, from the numbers you were suggesting earlier, it sounds like it's grown very, very quickly, has securing product become easier for you? It's become easier and harder. Okay.

It's become easier because now, you know, we have 18 employees at the company and they're a lot better at securing product than I was by myself. So that part, internal resourcing has become a lot easier. And then, you know, we did this big supply chain transformation in 2023, where we were really looking to go from that supply chain V1 that I described to, to supply chain B2, that, you know, the goal was this supply chain B2 could see us through essentially unlimited scale in the American market. So we were looking for canneries that could produce 80 million cans at your own.

million cans a year. So that was a transformation we went through. And by and large, we have been able to scale enormously and very, very quickly, you know, in the grand scheme of things. That being said, like, I think the sardine situation is a really good example. We have seen our demand for that product go through the roof, essentially exponentially. then that unpredictable demand that we are sometimes faced with, which we can go into in a minute, if we want to take into the starting situation, that is when we're presented with just challenges

because those things can happen so quickly. And this is not a super fast lead time supply chain. Like we're trying to tell our canaries what we need a year ahead, then six months ahead, then three months ahead placing the PO so they can really secure the raw material. that we need to produce the product that we need. So I think that's the tricky part of being a high growth brand in a long lead industry. You just never know what the growth is going to look like in a year. Well, I'm glad you got to the sardine part because there was one thing that I meant to say in the intro.

One other thing that piqued my interest in this whole story is that on Instagram, I have a really like messed up Instagram feed and algorithm. On Instagram, I get served a lot of B2B ads for Chinese sardine manufacturing facilities who on the ad itself say, are you dealing with the Moroccan sardine shortage? Source your canned sardines from China, et cetera, which I thought it was like really fascinating to me. Talk about so you're like getting to like, okay, you're 80, 100, million units. You know, up until again, five years ago, this was not a high growth category. I imagine for years and years you have the emergence of these very inexpensive canneries in China,

but also I believe Vietnam and Thailand and elsewhere. Prior to companies like you entering the market, was there sort of this shrinking of the industrial capacity in the types of places that you want to source from in, say, Europe or maybe, you know, parts of the U.S. that was shrinking due to this sort of global deindustrialization phenomenon and has that contributed to today now that it is a high growth category, or at least for you, it's a category that there are, you know, that's constricted, that it's constrained because of the sort of years of like hollowing out from global competition. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's the same stories as like all American manufacturing stories. there were once booming canneries on either coast of the U.S. In California, probably read Canary Row or on the coast of Maine, there were these bigger, more industrial canneries, and a combination of factors contributed to those shutting down. Basically, like, most canaries in the U.S. shut down, like, 15 years ago. Today, there are, this is an estimate, but I would say, like, five-ish in the lower, 48 and then probably several more in Alaska. Alaska is where you would find some of the bigger,

more industrial canneries that are doing like commodity Alaskan canned salmon, et cetera. But yeah, I think due a combination of factors, I know that there were really stringent FDA rules that were put in place about 15 years ago that a lot of the canaries in the U.S. couldn't upkeep, couldn't manage. Some of the fisheries really declined. So the Pacific Sardine and anchovy fisheries, there have been most. moments of real decline on both the east and west coast. And with the decline of those fisheries and the shutting down of those fisheries, the canneries followed because, obviously. And then having this very cheap processing available in various parts of Asia, so much of the processing

moved over there, like you were saying with the Alaskan processing that you see in China. So it's a common story and it definitely is what happened in the U.S. Sorry, just to be clear, the Moroccan sardine situation, it's not that you can't can sardines in Morocco. That's where the sardines themselves are caught and then exported to the canning places in, it seems, mostly Spain and maybe Portugal. Is that right? That is correct. There are certainly canneries and cannery infrastructure in Morocco, but so much of the raw material, from the Moroccan sardine fishery was being exported to Spain.

I think it was like 90% of the raw material in Spanish canneries of sardines was coming from Morocco. So, no, they have the canning infrastructure. And I think what we're seeing here is that they are preserving the raw material for their own exports. Because the ban is just on frozen sardine exports, not canning. sardine exports. So Morocco is protecting its raw material and is able to maintain its industry. It's very meaningful, large industry of exporting canned sardines. So has that affected fishwife personally, I guess? It has, but not in the ways you would necessarily suspect because we have never sourced from the Moroccan sardine fishery. We have been sourcing from the corner sardine

fishery for about five years. That at the time that we started selling certain. Cornish, so Cornwall, England. It was the only MSC Marine Stewardship Council certified sustainable fishery in Europe at the time. Then MSC is the most globally recognized certifying body for wild fisheries. It's the one that Fishwife goes by. So we were sourcing from this Cornish Sardine fishery. And then the Iberian sardine fishery was actually MSC certified, I believe, last year.

And so we started sourcing from that fishery as well, which is really exciting. So we're sourcing from these two MSC certified fisheries, now the only certified sustainable sardine fisheries in Europe. So we weren't affected in terms of our raw material supply being impacted. That being said, with, you know, so much inventory disappearing from the market. We saw our sardine sales starting in, I would say, December of last year, like, start to go hoo-hoo bananas. I think it was kind of first two to three-x the velocities that we had been seeing before and it has sustained and gone even up to, you know, four or five-x, which is massive. So, you know, getting calls from buyers that our retailers saying, hey, like my sardine shelf is completely wiped out.

can you step up and step in and supplies with sardines? And, you know, I remember having this conversation with my head of sales was like, we can do it. We're going to have to air freight the product in order to get it there in time. You know, we usually try to send things by quote unquote slow ship, which is the most economical, also the most environmentally sustainable. And, you know, we had to make the hard decision of like, okay, are we okay with our gross margin being compressed by these airshipments, as you can imagine, they're.

extremely expensive in order to capture the demand, maybe introduce new customers to fishwife sardines. We did make that choice many, many times over for many retailers. And it's just been so much demand for the sardines that we just haven't seen go down. I think the crazy thing is we also saw this huge trend around sardines also kicking up at the same time. So I was going to say, in the course of my due diligence for this podcast, I went on the canned sardines subreddit, a very active subreddit. And there were a few people complaining about they couldn't find sardines that they're like local trader joes or anything like that. And there were a bunch of posts also extolling the health benefits of sardines and making

me think that maybe, maybe I need to try them. No, I think just from a health perspective, canned fish is just like a great way to get some protein. I put it in salads. I'll like put canned tuna and a salad or something like that. I'm a big, I'm a big, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big, I'm a, I'm a, uh, I'm a big advocate. First of all, I find it interesting that actually people evidently are, they want sardine so bad. They're willing to, like, trade up. So, like, some like, market goes away and then they'll, like, go to the premium. But I want to talk a little bit more about, like, you know, when I think of the DTC brands, that truly, like, grew up in the age of, like, the olden age of Instagram, like the 2010s, you know, it seemed like the big opportunity was find a product.

It's very expensive. Let's say like a Warby Parker. You know, you don't really need to pay $350 for a pair of Luxottica glasses. We could build this for $20. We'll spend $10 on advertising and then we'll sell the product for $100. I'm just making up these numbers. And then we make $70 in profit. And it feels like there are just tons of companies and they came out of business school and stuff like that.

And they all identified all of these opportunities to find something that was premium and then like make a commodified version cut out the middlemen, do some good branding, make it a little glossy, put it on Instagram, et cetera. It feels like this is kind of the exact opposite where you have to invent a new category that doesn't really exist. Is this in part just like a function of like the changing, I'm interested, like the media marketplace such as that that playbook, like now if you started the Warby Parker rather than paying $20 for the Instagram ad, you'd pay $79 and left with a dollar margin or something like that and that you actually have to like do something totally different in order to build a DTC brand in the 2020s?

Yeah. I mean, to be clear, DTC makes up about 20% of our business. So it is a minority channel for us. All right. Even though it is incredibly, incredibly important for a fish wave, but it's certainly not the business that we're like building our economics around, you know, food businesses you're going to build in retail like that. the volume is. That being said, I think, I mean, doesn't totally answer your question, but like,

people want really quality products and people are willing to pay for them. I think that's what we've seen. Yeah. I think it's some crazy stat. Like 50% of the spending right now is being done by like, I don't know, like 5% of our population. Something crazy like that. People are just willing to pay for a much higher quality product. First of all, I think a lot of us were honestly burned with with some of those D to C brands where they're touting themselves as a lower cost, but equally high quality version as the like sort of traditional, like whatever Lake Cuse, whatever, you know. And maybe that didn't turn out to be the case for a lot of them.

I know I bought a bed frame from one of these companies, and by God, I was worse $800 I ever spent. Can I just make a plug for a brand though? I was just like, they did something good. And so I just feel like, like 10 or 11 years. ago, we bought an away suitcase and it like started breaking down recently and the zipper broke. They replaced it for free. And so like even I was 10 years old, so I was like, I think it was probably a marginally less quality product than whatever the incumbent suitcase company was at the time.

But they, but I was pretty surprised. They actually replaced a broken suitcase. I'm right there with you. I own three away suitcases and they're amazing. There's exceptions to the rule every time. And I think with fish wife, it's like, no, we're selling a super high quality product made by multi-generational European family-owned canneries. Like, it just is as good as it should be and needs to be. And we're not like doing any highfalutin new age stuff. I am attracted to that. I think other people are attracted to that just knowing like this truly is just the highest quality product. We're not we're not cut in corners here to make a cheaper, cheaper product.

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social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joe, you should make a way pay for their advertising on Apple. I know, so, it was such a free giveaway, but it did happen. Away, okay, away from personal brand preferences and just going back to the sardines for a second. So there are a bunch of different, like, themes that I, or keywords that I hear here.

So one is more demand for sardines. Sardines are having a moment. The other one is climate change. And we talked about the shortage of plankton due to potentially warmer waters. We've also been hearing about overfishing for ages and ages and ages. And you often see these competing headlines where, you know, people say the world's fish population is in danger. And then two months later, it's like, oh, no, we figured out more sustainable ways of fishing. And this demand is, or this supply is resilient and all of that.

When you look at the sardine shortage, which of those factors matters the most to you in, you know, the current moment? I think as a headline, the frustrating thing about seafood sustainability is that it is endlessly nuanced and it's changing constantly. So even with the sardine, the Moroccan sardine situation, they started to see a decline in the catch in 2023. It was down about 46%. that's only three years ago like fisheries science moves somewhat slowly doing assessments of fisheries takes a really long time

so TLDR everything that's being talked about all of the theories that you mentioned Tracy are just that they're theories and they're also like contributing factors to a much bigger picture that probably all of them are contributing not a single one and it's hard to tell

to what degree is just contributing So I'll like speak to these theories that are that are currently in the conversation. Sure. So the first that seems most likely is climate change generally. So there are warming waters in the mid-Atlantic that forage fish like sardines, like anchovies, like mackerel are very, very sensitive to water changes. So when the water temperature changes, they are likely to migrate to a cold. colder waters. So it might not even be that there are less sardines. It might simply be that the sardines have migrated somewhere, that the commercial fishermen have a lot of difficulty accessing. It could be

deeper in the water. It could be further in the water. They're just, they're in a new location. And it's not where the fishermen are used to catching. So that seems to be the most likely theory. warmer waters can also trigger like unexpected changes in in the food web obviously everything in the ocean is connected and when you know water temperature changes it can mean also there are more predators that are actively catching fishing fishing in the area so like you said tracy humans are not the only ones that are catching sardines so are tuna and other fish so there might just be more active predators in the area. There's also the plankton theory, which I think a lot of people are writing about, which is that the warmer water has triggered maybe less or less nutrient-dense, fatty caloric.

I hate a skinny plankton. I know. Absolutely hate when you get served on those. But those can lead to, you know, lean or less fatty sardines, which are the ones that folks are looking to catch. So there are all these factors in combination, definitely all tied up in climate change, hard to know which is contributing the most. I think one thing that's interesting in this circumstances, from what I can tell, like overfishing is not the main culprit. So I mentioned MSC earlier. That is, you know, the certifying body that we most lean on and look to. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood, a bit of a mouthful. They're also a very globally respected certifying body, and they're the ones that have given,

I think this fishery currently has a yellow rating, which is not bad. But basically, in their assessment is that the fishery is being well regulated, strong enforcement is in place, which leads me to believe that it's less than overfishing and more of a climate, climate issue. I think one thing that's really, really important to highlight is that when you see, you know, this is not a fishery shutdown situation. This is a like, you know, frozen sardine export ban situation. But when you do see, you know, a market being capped on a fishery, it seems a little bit scary, but that's actual responsible fisheries management in practice. That means that, You know, everyone's coming together and saying, hey, we're not seeing the amount of fish that we expected to see or we're not seeing the size of fish that we expected to find. We need to shut down the fishing season and allow the fishery to repopulate itself. And I think the amazing thing is there are so, so many examples of there being, you know, decline in catch.

fisheries shutting down for between like three to five years and in the span of that time fully becoming certified sustainable again, aka able to fully repopulate and sustain themselves year over year. So I think that's really important for people to understand is like, don't freak out when you see, when you see those empty shelves, like be happy that like people are putting these restrictions into place. Do you get inbound business inquiries from companies that are probably marginally or somewhat below your standards like canneries and China, et cetera? Or it's like, look, you can say, like your inbox flooded with different B2B suppliers at different parts of the supply chain offering yourself?

Definitely. I would say, you know, more like my LinkedIn is flooded with that. I feel like somehow they're still not getting my email by and large or maybe they're going straight to my spam. but yes, I don't spend that much time looking at them if I'm being honest. What's happened to your own sardine pricing in this environment? Because as I understand it, you know, you have this premium product, which already is at a higher price point than some other equivalents. Does it go up further if people are, you know, struggling to find tin cans on the shelves of Trader Joe's or something like that? I do think that we expect our sardine prices to go up.

It's like an active conversation. Again, all this is happening so quickly. But I think we can only assume that we will see. And we will see prices go up as the two fisheries that we're sourcing from become more and more competitive. Then the other thing I want to ask, again, as a non-fish lover, will fish consumers, do they trade to other types of fish if they can't get sardines? Yes, they do. I don't know if I have really good data. a share on it, but we are definitely seeing folks come in in retail online, starting with one species,

and then overtime expanding to the rest of ours. It's a really good question. I would say, like, maybe not anchovies because anchovies generally aren't looked at as, like, the protein replacement in your meal, but between sardines, mackerel, tuna, salmon, trout, like, we're definitely seeing trading between species. So obviously, like, to maintain a sort of vexed. valuable brand. You have to maintain the brand itself. Here is a question, I've always wanted to ask someone this. You know, we live in this age of brand collabs, right? It'll be like, oh, like, Lulu Lemon is

dropping a new limited edition with like Kraft Heinz, macaroni and cheese, like, you know, yoga gear, like limited supply. I would like that to be fair. So like I know you'd like done some, you know, with like the olive oil company, etc. Are brand collabs really brand collabs? Like, okay, We're going to send three employees of yours and three of we're going to figure something out. Or is like someone comes up with an idea and someone else writes a check and then they like co-brand a post on Instagram. Oh my gosh. They're so the former. I have never done anything like what you're describing with the second.

I'm like to my detriment, these collabs are like so, so, so in depth. And we spend so many months on them. Yeah, we're about to have two huge collabs come out. One is coming out tomorrow with Whole Foods. We're doing a collaborative series of toasts, which they've never done with any brand before. They were no dollars exchanged. We've been working on it for, you know, six months. And we're about to have, I can share another one.

It comes out after August 11th. Like these collabs are so not pay to play in any way at all. Like our Flyby Jing product collab, which is a very popular one. It's just, you know, we buy their sauce at a wholesale price. We put it in our products. and like that's it. It's just super clean, classic ingredient purchasing. The other brand related question I have, rather than say DTCC to describe the broader thing is like DeNovo brands, right?

Coming out of nowhere, et cetera. And so, you know, over the years, I think the ones that grew up in the 2010 is like paid an increasing like Instagram tax, right, to maintain that brand. I notice on your website, you actually have a thing where influencers can email. They're like, oh, like, I will post about Fishwife and then you like arrange some. deal with them. There are so many influencers out there and there's so many want to be influencers. Do you feel that from your perspective, you have good options or are the influencers that you actually want to work with because they're aligned with your aesthetic and brand? Do they grow and grow their capacity to like, is there a real scarcity of the types of influencers that you would actually

want to work with rather than just ones that have a high follower account? I don't feel there's scarcity at all. I think Fishwife has a unique relationship with the influencer landscape because we really don't do any pay to play. Like, every once in a while we'll have an influencer make some content. And obviously we're going to compensate them for their content and then add a bump on top for their audience if it's like a collaborative post. But like we really have done it less than 10 times in our life. So I think, you know, we're lucky to. Because you do have this affiliate program thing on your website.

It says get paid when you share about Fishway. That's the commission-based program different than a flat fee. I think basically to pay influencers flat fees to post on their Instagram, there can be truly like astronomical rates. I've been quoted, you know, $40,000, $30,000 for someone with, let's say, like, 800,000 followers. Like we simply can't afford that. So, you know, we have this.

a program, influencers are in commission, something that we have always invested in, seating, making sure that we're getting product in their hands. But yeah, there is kind of like a huge leap between a commission-based program and like paying a flat fee, which a lot of them are very, very high. Just going back to the supply chain for a second. So packaging is obviously very important to Fishwife. You've got the branding aspect, but you also have the tins themselves. everything's coming in a tin. Have you been impacted at all in recent months by, you know, tariffs on things like aluminum packaging and stuff like that? The tariffs on aluminum packaging, we haven't seen like directly impact our business. First of all, we're not taking ownership of

those. Our canneries buy the tins. And we haven't seen like a meaningful increase. We've seen it in the course of our five years of being business that tin prices have gone. up or aluminum prices of Ghana. But as of late, especially inured to tariffs, that has not been the biggest hit. Like, we have had tariffs supplied to the products that we're importing from Europe. Those have an impact on the business and are not ideal. Europe has a 15% tariff right now that was put in place in April 2025. And it sucks.

It's like millions and millions of dollars. We got refunded a million and a half dollars last month. which was great, I showed up in the bank account. But now you'll have new tariffs. We now have new tariffs. And now a million and a half is not even, you know, it's a percentage of what we have paid in tariffs.

We've always dealt with tariffs. Like there has been a 35% import duty on tuna pact and olive oil since we started importing that product. And the tariffs don't stack. So like, for example, our tuna olive oil, when the tariff curtain fell, like we didn't increase, we didn't experience incremental tariffs. But no, it sucks.

It definitely like it hits gross margin. And it just feels really stupid. So I wish that we didn't have to pay those millions. I got a tariff refund recently, which I didn't really understand because I thought only businesses were receiving them. But I got it for like $7.14. That's fantastic. Congratulations.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. You create a new category that's very, at least in the U.S., right? You create this new category of like premium tintfish. And then others, and I think you sort of alluded to this, then others discover it. You might get other startups. Or I could imagine, but I actually didn't do any research on this particular question. I could imagine that what you might get, and I think you see this is you have some existing

company that is known for their commodity version. And then they'll come up with their equivalent of like the Starbucks Reserve. And they'll make a label that's probably like kind of a knockoff of a, you know, a fishwife label or something. something similar or other company will expand, we'll do a tin fish line. They'll see the opportunity that you have found. And I'm curious, like, you mentioned that there was a fair degree of slack in some of these canneries in, say, 2021, where they're not doing three shifts a day, seven days a week. Do you see your demand aside more scarcity at the cannery level from companies essentially one way or another trying to get a share of your market?

I would see where we're seeing scarcity. It's mostly because of the volume from Fishwife. Oh, interesting. Not to brag, but growing so much so quickly, that's where we're seeing, you know, sort of constraints is that we're taking up so much more kidding line than we thought we would be and they thought we would be in the span of two years. Yeah, I think it's, we are lucky to have established like a couple modes. I think people are willing to pay for FishWife because it is a really, really high quality

product and because we have been able to tell the story of why it is a high quality product over the past five and a half years we built the brand online which you know hadn't never happened in the in the can fish category before so it's it's a big leap to pay what you have to pay for a fishwife product and and to earn that pricing power i think is very challenging to be quite honest um and takes a ton of brand building work. Like, yes, the product has to taste truly amazing to get people to buy it and come back and come back and come back. But that brand building work is very difficult to replicate.

And then I think as you're seeing here, like, you have to be extremely agile on your feet in terms of supply chain. Like, it is not. No business is easy to run. No global supply chain is easy to run. And definitely seafood is not. So, you know, we've seen new entrants come into the category. But honestly, in terms of like categories that clearly have heat, I would say ours has had less meaningful new entrance than many.

Sorry, one more sourcing question. And again, as a non-fish person, I don't really get a lot of these distinctions. But I'm looking at some of your smoked salmon. Smoke salmon with fly by Jing chili crisp, which sounds good. It sounds good. It says that the salmon comes from it's farm salmon, not wild caught. But how do you make the decision between wild caught and farmed? And what are the distinctions?

I never really understood this. I would see it started as a little bit of a happenstance of trying to figure out supply chain. And I really, really struggled to stand up a wild Alaskan salmon supply chain. I just like could not get in touch with the canneries. I would get in touch with one like one supplier, one other supplier. And they were sourcing different species of salmon. and they didn't want to mix. Like, I could not figure out how to scale it.

Farm salmon makes up between 70 to 80% of the salmon that were eating globally. Like, if you're eating salmon, odds are you're eating farm salmon. It is a much, much more manageable supply chain. First of all, there's so much of it. And it freezes really well. It travels really, really well. And you are not having to deal with seasonal purchasing, which, as you can imagine, you know,

can necessitate the outlay of enormous amounts of cash. With farms they are producing throughout the year, harvesting throughout the year. So it's a much less lumpy cash outlay, which makes it just a much easier to supply chain to navigate. There are fluctuations in pricing for farms. For sure, but slightly less volatile than wild. I think we're going to leave it there. But thank you so much for answering all of our fish-related questions, Becca.

appreciate it. It's really a pleasure to really, really get into it. I appreciate the opportunity. So there's a lot to pick out from that conversation. I mean, I hadn't, again, I don't think about salmon that often, but I hadn't realized that, yeah, if you're, if you're doing wild caught salmon and you can only buy at certain times of the year, then you are going to lay out like a huge amount of money because everyone's trying to do the same thing at the same time. No, it totally makes sense that it would be, as the tech exists, to farm salmon, that that would be a lot more. appealing and you get all kinds of stability and stuff like that. I really enjoyed that conversation. There's so many like interesting strands there. I think it's interesting that like it's, you know, so you see a headline like the catch in Morocco is down significantly. And you're like, and how that like we might not actually fully have the answers that like, you know, people are trying to piece together. Oh, maybe it's something to do with the plankton. Maybe it's something to do with overfishing. Maybe it's something to do with water temperature, et cetera. that we don't really know.

Well, I also find the connection there really interesting because, like, okay, something might be happening in the waters off Morocco. Maybe they're warming up. Maybe the plankton aren't as fat or as bountiful as they used to be. But suddenly that becomes not just Morocco's problem, but another country's problem in the form of Spain. So it seems like the Moroccan sardine export ban is now becoming a diplomatic issue with the Spanish because now there are attempts to get to, for Spain to take.

Morocco to the negotiating table and actually get them to, like, call off the export ban. Yeah, it's wild. And the fact that, like, there is actually quite a big market for trading ups. I mean, I guess, like, if you need sardine, you need sardine and another fish isn't going to work. And so the idea that, like, okay, now there is suddenly, you know, even if it's like a very different supply chain at first, that the impairment of the sort of commodity supply chain will invariably affect the premium supply chain. I honestly think the trading up, phenomenon. on when it comes to food inflation is a real thing. So, you know, people are thinking, well, if I'm going to have to pay $20 for a pack of ground beef, I might as well spend $30 and get some stakes

or something like that. In fact, I had that conversation with a woman in a supermarket the other day. Also, can I just say, I know I just spent the whole episode talking about how I don't like fish. Yes, but I was at a dinner party last weekend and a former teak wood supplier who we should get on the podcast. He's now an organic farmer. He made candied salmon. Oh, yeah. And it was so good. I've never had it before. And it was actually delicious. And I ate the whole thing. No, that is, that's really tasty. Yeah. So that's a good entree into like, maybe more exploration on your part into the fish world. There's all kinds of fish that theoretically you might like. I like a lot of stuff. I like sea urchin. I love raw sea urchin. I love oysters. I love a lot of that stuff. But I don't know. Just like cooked fish.

No, I get, I get it. Anyway, should leave it there. Let's see if it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow Becca Milstein on Instagram at B.B. Milstein.

Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Kermann, Dashel Bennett, at DashBot. Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks and Kevin Lazzano at Kevin Lloyd-Lazano. And for more Oddlots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash all thoughts. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our disdust. Discord.g.g. And if you enjoy Oddlods, if you want to see us do more food episodes or even more seafood episodes, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

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